Grafana Tempo Skill

Comprehensive guide for Grafana Tempo - the cost-effective, high-scale distributed tracing backend designed for OpenTelemetry.

What is Tempo?

Tempo is a high-scale distributed tracing backend that:

Trace-ID lookup model - No indexing of every attribute, keeps ingestion fast and storage costs low
OpenTelemetry native - First-class support for OTLP protocol
Object storage backed - Stores traces in affordable S3, GCS, or Azure Blob Storage
TraceQL query language - Powerful query language inspired by PromQL and LogQL
Apache Parquet format - 5-10x less data pulled per query vs legacy formats
Multi-tenant by default - Built-in tenant isolation via X-Scope-OrgID header